The episode is directly linked to reducing the virus, said Mark Escott, director of the medical system for EMS for Austin and Travis County. “We have fewer symptomatic people and less demand for testing,” he told county commissioners on Monday. “I think to some degree, we can expect that we will have oscillations in the demand for testing over time.”
In Dallas County, the demand for testing has significantly decreased following a drip infection, said Philip Huang, director of the county’s health department. The rules for testing, which snagged through parking lots in June and July and people waited hours, have disappeared, he said.
Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, thinks the drop-off also stems from frustration with how long it lasted to get results. Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, two of the largest private test companies, both acknowledged that the overwhelming demand increased dramatically in July.
Ho said that last month, during the worst of the Texas outbreak, it was routine to hear stories of people waiting weeks just to get an appointment for a test, or to sit for hours in drive-line.
“You would only do this if you were super sick,” she said.
But the problems for testing are not all linked to the behavior of Texans. There are also questions about flaws in the state’s data collection that may have disturbed who was sick and where. Texas had 1 million completed tests by the end of July, the results of which were was not assigned to a particular province. Officials are now sorting through the backlog, which could have had the effect that the hiccup population appeared smaller than it really was.
